Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Brown's Clinton Endorsement Highlights his Record of Non-Leadership

With the focus of the Presidential primaries
turning to California, it was perhaps inevitable that the national media would
swivel its attention at least momentarily toward the Golden State’s own
political-economy and its trajectory over the past several years. The New
York Times, on the eve of Governor Jerry Brown’s endorsement of Hillary
Clinton, ran a story recommending that the “Success
of Jerry Brown, and California, Offers Lesson to National Democrats.”

That could certainly be true, but while the New York Times suggests that this is a
lesson Democrats should celebrate and emulate, a more careful reading of recent
history demonstrates that it is a cautionary tale.

The NYT praises
Democrats in California as “a model of electoral success and cohesion,” arguing
that it is “one of the few states in the country…where Democrats are completely
in control, holding every statewide office as well as overwhelming majorities
in the Assembly and the Senate.” They
praise state Democrats for pursuing legislation “on guns, tobacco, the
environment, the minimum wage, and immigrant rights.”

But that’s hardly the whole story. Jerry Brown’s own triumph came in 2010, the
year of the Tea Party surge. Many read
his election as a rebuke of the rigid, pledge-taking radicals in the Republican
Party, who pursued vicious policies of austerity rather than pursuing
reinvestment in a public sphere that had the capacity to uplift people whose
livelihoods had been badly impacted by recession.

In reality, Brown ran on a Tea Party lite platform. He took a pledge not to raise taxes without a
referendum, tying his hands for the first years of his governorship. During those years he pursued savage
austerity, damaging social services, schools, universities, and other core
institutions in the public realm, harming all those people who don’t have to
resources to rely exclusively on the private sector for support.

Brown failed to tackle the state’s structural ills that keep
it on autopilot towards austerity over the long term, absent courageous
leadership. And Brown made clear—trumpeting
his philosophy of “creative inaction”—that he would offer no such
leadership. Instead of tackling big,
structural problems, solutions to which would free up resources and allow the
state to rationalize its tax structure and services, he set about
micro-managing public institutions and turning them into the “villains” of the
piece.

A consistent target has been the University of
California. When UC students requested
tuition relief after decades of dramatically rising costs, Brown compared them—students
at a public institution, asking that
their institution be made genuinely public—to
bankers asking for a bailout, and crudely offered them a “reality sandwich.”

Aside from his policies of austerity, his political
cowardice, and his attacks on the vulnerable in a state of great resources,
Brown has also put a dramatic check on the influence of his party. When other Democrats sought to challenge
Brown’s commitment to austerity by suggesting that reinvestment in the public
sphere could do more to help Californians, Brown shut them down and made clear that
he would veto efforts to reject his tepid and therefore damaging liberalism.

The NYT clearly
does not understand that in a state like California, with its supermajority
rules, majorities in the Assembly and Senate do not amount to “complete
control.” Absent supermajorities, Democrats
are in no position to seriously address fundamental questions of taxation,
revenue, and public priorities. Without
a supermajority, the party cannot challenge the state’s slide toward austerity
with a population growing in size and in demographic complexity.

When he ran for re-election as a popular incumbent with a
massive fundraising advantage in 2014, Brown had the opportunity to mount a
campaign of ideas and generate coattails for the Democratic Party to allow it
to seize such a supermajority. Instead,
he ignored the election altogether and let the party fight a series of
disparate battles across the state. He
ran a non-campaign laced with contempt for California’s voters and the media.

So when Jerry Brown endorses Hillary Clinton, saying “the
stakes couldn’t be higher,” he is articulating a truth, but also exposing the
extent to which he failed Californians for whom the stakes in 2010 were very
high indeed. Brown is no party-builder,
no progressive, and no kind of leader.

His much vaunted “fiscal discipline” is just another word
for disciplining the poor, the sick, the young, the weak, and anyone else on
the margins of society. In that, he
represents the liberal orthodoxy of the large, right-wing of the Democratic
Party that is fighting off a challenge from the left in the form of the uninspiring
but much-needed candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders.

I hope California voters and the media will take a slightly
harder look at the record of Jerry Brown and the right-wing of the Democratic
Party before they recommend his mismanagement of California as a model for the
country.

The once and future eternal Governor? I will be a little upset, but I'll console myself with the thought that eight years after that I'll get the choice between a Jerry Brown clone or a cyborg into which his consciousness has been uploaded.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.